A Study Of Nonhuman Matters’ Sublime In Orfeo From The Perspective Of The New Materialism

The American contemporary writer Richard Powers(1957-),one of the representative American postmodern writers after Thomas Pynchon and Don De Lillo,has obtained many literary awards such as the American National Book Award and the American Pulitzer Prize in literature.Ecology,technology and music have always been the themes of Powers’ novels,and also run through his eleventh work Orfeo(2014).This novel Orfeo employs the double narrative structure,the writing characteristics of Powers’ works: one narrative line is the protagonist musician Peter Els’ s escape journey in reality due to his “terrorist” musical experiment on Serratia marcescens DNA;the other one describes Els’ s memories from childhood to present time,and major historical events in the modern western world by juxtaposing time and space,exploring the themes of human,technology,ecology and music.From the perspective of material agency based on the new materialism,this paper discusses the sublime experience of the characters in Orfeo brought by three kinds of nonhuman matters’ agency,namely,the technological matters,the natural matters and the instrumental musical matters.In addition to introduction and conclusion,the body of this thesis is divided into three chapters.The introduction briefly introduces the novelist Richard Powers and his novel Orfeo,the literature review at home and abroad on this novel,and expounds the theoretical framework and the thesis statement of this paper.The second chapter mainly explains the postmodern sublime experience brought by technological matters’ animate agency to Els,analyzing the feelings of terror and awe caused by the digital technology’s authoritative power over Els and exploring the feeling of terror and awe led by the dynamic force of modern architectures.The third chapter demonstrates the ecological sublime experience brought by vibrant agency of natural things such as animals and bacteria,analyzing the feelings of humility and admiration involved in the vitality of the dog Fidelio and the establishment of the companion relationship between human and animal,as well as illustrating the feelings of fear and awe developed by the bacterial transcorporeal force,thus giving rise to non-anthropocentric reasoning.The fourth chapter elaborates the transcendent sublime produced by instrumental musical affective agency,exploring the feelings of elevation and pleasure resulting from modern instrumental musical affective power and presenting the feelings of admiration and awe arising from the postmodern instrumental musical affective power.The chapter five is the conclusion of the whole thesis,indicating some realistic significance of reflecting on the relationship between humans and non-human matters in contemporary society,as well as on anthropocentric thought.In Orfeo,by illustrating the sublime experience brought by the agency of the technological matters,the natural maters and the instrumental musical matters to characters in the novel,Powers proves the interconnectedness and the interdependence of human and nonhuman,criticizes anthropocentrism,questions the human exceptionalism and thus topples humans from their pedestal of superiority.